#museum repatriation

[door]

We need to open up and excavate our institutions, dig up our ongoing pasts with all the archaeological tools that can be brought to hand, sometimes a teaspoon and toothbrush, other times a pick-axe or a jack-hammer. Any museum object has a double historicity, of course—its existence before and after the act of accession.

Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museum: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution